Pitchforks: 4/5
Artist: Fiona Apple
Album: The Idler Wheel
Record Label: Epic Records
Fiona Apple likes to tell you, in an honest, pull-no punches approach, what is going on in her head and her life when she writes songs. Every album represents a snapshot of where she was at those fixed points in time and space.
The Idler Wheel, her first new album in seven years released Monday, deals with a bad romance, break-ups, mutually assured destruction, self-sabotage and hopeful new prospects.
While she’s been away since the release of Extraordinary Machine in 2005, artists like Florence Welch and Adele brought the female vocalist/lyricist back in vogue and chart dominance. Now, for Apple, is as appropriate a time as any to make a comeback.
As always, Apple brought with her the two assets that made fans fall in love with her when the artist released her first album, Tidal, in 1996: her alto and intimate, poetic lyrics.
She’s retained her gift for uniquely phrasing situations and feelings. On “Every Single Night,” the album’s single, she expresses the physical pain that comes with working herself up with anxiety by singing, “That’s where the pain comes in / Like a second skeleton / Tryin‘ to fit beneath the skin.”
Peppered throughout most of Idler Wheel’s lyrical content is the slow, gradual break-up of a relationship, probably about her failed romance with writer Jonathan Ames, whom she dated until 2010. Music aficionados will probably classify this whole album, overall, as a “break-up album.”
Apple is casual concerning who did what to whom. She readily takes on some of the blame with her partner’s behavior on songs like “Werewolf,” especially when she sings, “I could liken you to a werewolf the way you left me for dead / But I admit that I provided a full moon.”
She doesn’t let her former lover off the hook quite that easily. On “Regret,” she puts him down with some truly vitriolic slights, like “Now when you look at me, you're condemned to see / The monster your mother made you to be.”
Not all of the album is a downer; it’s last two tracks, “Anything We Want” and “Hot Knife,” sound optimistic, especially coming from her.
Anything’s admissions to blushing and wanting to play hooky, mixed with the following track’s repeated chant, “I'm a hot knife if he's a pad of butter / If I get a chance, I'm gonna show him that he's never gonna never need another,” sound as though she sees light on the horizon and is finally aware of her propensity to destroy relationships so that she can try not to repeat the cycle with the next one.
With Apple, her lyrics almost don’t require any extravagant production to be added over her voice and words, but Idler Wheel’s almost homemade production separate the more simplified tracks from its more “produced” numbers, such as “Every Single Night,” “Daredevil,” “Werewolf” and “Hot Knife.”
It’s to her credit that even on the less produced tracks, her vocals explode with feeling that command her listener’s attention. One can almost be tempted to hear just her vocals alone – no piano, no production of any kind. They make tracks like “Valentine” and her proclamations of love all the more striking.
And after 15 years, “striking” is what she still is, and nothing less.
Reach the reporter at tccoste1@asu.edu
